After more than a year of intense work, the European project to improve the support to SMEs concludes the planned activities with interesting results to improve the processes of investment in innovative ideas
The closing meeting of the Innoinvest project took place on 10 and 11 January 2022 at the Science and Technology Park Berlin-Adlershof. The meeting focused on the presentation of the final results of the project and on the different capitalisation actions.
The project, promoted by the European Commission within the framework of the Horizon 2020 programme, has been developed by the consortium formed by Málaga TechPark together with the Poznan Science and Technology Park in Poland, the WISTA Science and Technology Park in Germany and the Tehnopol-Tallinn Science Park in Estonia: European parks that are also members of the IASP, the International Association of Science and Technology Parks and Areas of Innovation, which has its headquarters in the Málaga Technopolis.
During the development of the project, the partners have worked on the analysis and improvement of investment processes that enable SMEs to introduce new innovative products and technologies. The partners exchanged their expertise and, with the participation of several collaborating entities, investigated how to reduce information asymmetry between investors and suppliers, how to improve project investment readiness of entrepreneurs, how to reduce the risk for investors and corporate business partners, and how to better prepare them to collaborate with start-ups.
Also, having different starting points in the project, the partners transferred the overall improvements of the investment processes and the results of the initiative into an action plan. While the Poznan Science and Technology Park currently runs an investment programme, Malaga TechPark and Tehnopol plan to initiate one in the near future. In addition, WISTA runs an accelerator programme that matches start-ups and industrial partners.
All the results will be compiled in a Design Option Paper (DOP), which contains a compilation of the best practices identified and a series of recommendations addressed to those innovation entities interested in implementing any of them. The document will be available through the EU’s Cordis platform in the coming weeks.
About Innoinvest
The overall objective of the Innoinvest programme has been to support entrepreneurs in boosting their business processes and to develop tools that improve the investment methods of small and medium-sized enterprises, especially by facilitating the cooperation of SMEs with corporate companies.
Driven by the European Commission in the framework of the Horizon 2020 programme, through the INNOSUP call, this initiative aims to test new approaches in order to strengthen innovation support to European SMEs by improving their innovation management capacity, adopting and pursuing the right innovation strategies, and managing their innovation processes by implementing the efficiency of innovation spending.
The Innosup project has applied the TWINNING+ peer-to-peer learning methodology. This method allows project partners to receive practical feedback and advice from each other on the implementation of investment programmes based on the provision of business assistance in order to empower a company to overcome challenges related to its growth and the development of high value-added products or services.
Málaga TechPark continues its visibility strategy in several European programmes. In previous years, together with the Poznan Science and Technology Park and the Tehnopol-Tallinn Science Park, it participated in the Target SME project with the aim of promoting the development of SMEs located in European innovation spaces through marketing tools.